The Answer Sheet: May 23, 2010 - May 29, 2010

In less than a decade women will account for 59 percent of total undergraduate enrollment and 61 percent of graduate enrollment at the country’s colleges and universities and already have a dominant presence at every degree level, a new government report shows. But women still remain severely underrepresented in certain fields, the report shows, and young adult males still have higher median earnings than young adult females with the same levels of education at every degree level.

A government analysis of U.S. schools shows that one in six public school students attend high poverty schools and that the percentage of high-poverty schools has significantly increased over the past decade. There's a lot more data too.

As the summer internship season begins, a lot of kids are going to be surprised about just how boring some seemingly exciting jobs really are. Still, says education counselor Eileen Wilkinson, every internship can teach some lessons.

I published a guest post yesterday about a postcard campaign starting today by a coalition of non-profit groups to try to persuade First Lady Michelle Obama to talk to her husband about changing his administration’s education policy on high-stakes standardized...

Are college students as nice as they used to be? Apparently, no, and modern technology may be partly to blame. A new University of Michigan study shows that today’s college students are not as empathetic as they used to be.

Organizations opposed to high-stakes standardized tests are starting a postcard-writing campaign aimed at persuading First Lady Michelle Obama to "encourage" President Obama to end the use of high stakes tests. Lisa Guisbond of FairTest writes about the effort.

New vocabulary words should be taught in literary context. That's the conventional wisdom. But a teacher writes about how she she was successful with her students by being unconventional with vocab lessons.

NBC reporter Ann Curry delivered a commencement address at Wheaton College in Massachusetts over the weekend, but thought she was talking to the student body at the Illinois institution of the same name.

Nearly 5 million kids across the country participated in state and local competitions for the 2010 National Geography Bee, and it came down to 10 finalists--all boys 11 to 13 years old -- in today’s championship round being held in the nation’s capital.

Maybe it’s the advent of spring, or the promise of prom, but more students are engaging in public displays of affection at school--and it isn’t only the adults in the building who are getting embarrassed and annoyed. Kids are complaining that their friends are grossing them out. Where should the line be drawn?

Statistics can be deceiving. I received an email taking issue with a post I wrote on Sunday in which I challenged part of a Steven Brill article in The New York Times magazine. Here's the email, and why I wrote what I wrote.

This is not a defense of ethnic studies in general. This is not a defense of an ethnic studies program in particular. What follows is an open letter written by Tom Horne, Arizona’s longtime secretary of education, that explains why he disliked an ethnic studies program in the Tuscon Unified School District so much that he pushed through a law that he hoped would end it. I find his motivations highly revealing.

The state of Arizona has gotten a lot of attention lately for its decision to remove teachers who speak with pronounced foreign accent and/or whose speech is ungrammatical from classrooms with students learning to speak English. But the idea wasn’t original to the Arizona Board of Education.

Many colleges and universities across the country suddenly have a good problem: They are over-enrolled for this fall and are scrambling to figure out how to accommodate the extra students in classes and dormitories.

Texas isn’t the only place with lousy social studies standards, though you might be forgiven for thinking so considering all the attention that Texas Board of Education has received in recent months as it adopted a new set of standards.

In a New York Times magazine article today, writer Steven Brill compares a charter school in Harlem with a traditional public school which is housed in the same building. He says the student populations are the same. They aren't.